Fred Wong, Calgary’s former transit director, can vaguely recall first hearing complaints the LRTs were overcrowded.

It wasn’t long into the start of his career planning CTrain frequency, in the mid-1980s.

A generation later, the LRT network has gotten longer but the trains haven’t — they just got more and more packed, more people filling them at more stations.

There’s a bit of transit jargon to describe what people on the south line experience in peak periods: crush loads. If you’ve tried to squeeze on at Anderson station at 7:30 a.m., that term may ring familiar.

More breathing room is finally on its way, with construction of the last platform extensions due to wrap this year, and new trains arriving to allow extended chains by the end of 2015.

The four-car train project has been underway since 2007. The entire west LRT line started later and finished sooner.

Expanding the whole network for bigger LRT chains, from the stations to the electrical upgrades to extra cars, has quietly totalled $300 million, according to figures Calgary Transit provided.

That’s greater than the combined cost of the three newest stations on the northeast leg (Saddletowne, Martindale) and northwest (Tuscany).

“That’s incredible,” said southwest Coun. Diane Colley-Urquhart. She remembers the outcry about sardine trains when she first sought election in Canyon Meadows in 2000.

“It always costs more when you have to retrofit. I wish we’d have had the foresight 10 years ago to get into the four-car platforms.”

Construction has taken seven years, starting downtown then extending outward to stations that kept handling passengers even while they were being upgraded. Of the 22 platform extensions outside the core, only Chinook LRT was closed for an extended period.

Calgary Transit had made provisions for longer platforms when it developed the CTrain line to launch in 1981. Edmonton built extended LRT platforms from the beginning, and now can — and sometimes does — run five-car chains to give more comfortable rides to Oilers game crowds or during the morning rush.

But look where building longer platforms and underground stations got Edmonton: it has only one train route, with one-third the ridership of Calgary’s 300,000-person-a-day light rail network.

“In Calgary, we were able to to develop faster because we did it more cheaply,” Wong said.

The city was still building three-car platforms as late as 2001’s Fish-Creek Lacombe LRT, though all stations since were designed to handle four-car chains.

To compensate for stubbier platforms, officials have added more frequent trains, Wong said. Though they’re running out of room to jam more peak-period trains onto downtown 7th Avenue.

Four-car service will give the city 33 per cent more capacity per chain. There’s room to fit up to 200 people per car, said Chris Jordan, manager of strategic transit planning.

By the time a next full order of new vehicles has arrived by late 2017, the city will be able to run longer trains on three-quarters of peak period runs along the Tuscany-Somerset “red” line, he said.

That route will be Calgary Transit’s focus for bigger trains, because managers deem the crunch along the south leg is turning users away.

“It’s literally so full on some days that we need four-car trains to meet the latent demand,” Jordan said.

Things can seem nearly as fish-can bad in the northwest, and may worsen when the Tuscany LRT opens this month. Rocky Ridge resident Garry Knipe has shifted his work day to get to Crowfoot station at 6:20 a.m., to boost his odds of getting a seat. By the time the train’s closer to downtown, “I can see people struggling to get on,” he said.

Knipe doesn’t expect the extra room to last long once four-car trains begin next year, as more Calgarians are lured by the promise of more spacious trains.

“Even if it does get as crowded again in 18 months, perhaps two years, then you’ve got those extra people off the road,” he said.

To Dan Furst, who boards daily at Dalhousie — second from the northwest leg’s current end — longer trains aren’t that necessary yet, though he’s glad to see the city planning for future demand.

“It’s never so uncomfortably congested that you feel like you’re in Tokyo, but odds are you’ll be standing for at least part of the ride,” Furst said.

Wong, who retired in 2012, believes bringing in four-car service might have made sense during last decade’s boom. In earlier days, the public wasn’t as supportive of transit investment, so overbuilding for the network’s eventual needs would have likely been a tough political sell, he said.

Many riders have argued platform extensions should have come before line extensions such as the west LRT. In 2007, that group included an occasional Herald columnist named Naheed Nenshi.

“Far better not to build the west line and invest in more buses and the immediate refurbishment of existing stations to accommodate four-car trains,” he wrote.

The mayor refused an interview on the topic this week. A spokesman said Nenshi “has always thought four-car trains were important.”

If there won’t be much sitting room for long on four-car trains, what’s on the horizon?

There’s no provision for five-car service in the city’s 30-year transit plan, though the city has suburban land for further platform extensions, Jordan said. The 7th Avenue blocks can’t fit longer trains — some old platform blocks couldn’t fit chains of four — but the eventual 8th Avenue underground line for Tuscany-Somerset will be built for longer trains.

Which means that maybe by the 2040s or 2050s, Calgary’s light rail system may finally be comparable, in this regard, to Edmonton’s LRT.

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